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End of Year (2010) IT Wrap-up

Excuses and Stuff Once again, I've reached the end of yet another year of minimal T-related blogging. It's frustrating because there's so many things I want to talk about and so little time to do it in. It's not that there's nothing going on - we're busier than ever and we're doing some fascinating things with domino and with other systems. I've been dying to talk about our three-plus year painful but ambitious domino project but it's just not ready yet. I can't talk about it until it's all humming along smoothly. The List So where have we been going with our computing stuff this year? Well, there's the ambitious domino project that I mentioned which is aimed at putting together a CRM which doesn't simply use our NAB for lookups, it actually controls the NAB - and according to a bizarre and complex set of business rules. It's happening but our rules are very complex and we're learning a lot about the difference between impl

Book Review: IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide by Karen Hooper

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide by Karen Hooper Paperback : 296 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ] Release Date : August 2010 ISBN : 1849680205 ISBN 13 : 978-1-849680-20-2 I've just finished reading Karen Hooper's excellent IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide and it's awesome. In fact, this book is so good that I'd already gone online partway through the third chapter and ordered a print copy for my workplace library. Of course, it helps that PACKT Publishing is having an IBM Month this November. There's a bunch of special offers but the ones to really take note of are; 20% off all Packt IBM print books 25% off if you purchase 3 or more books 30% off all Packt IBM ebooks Back to the Review... So, who is the audience for the book? Well, it's the layperson, the employees who are new to Notes or who need to brush up on their skills. That's not to say that there isn't good material and tips for the techies out there - but that the best value gains will come from the n

Coming Soon - A Review of "IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide" by Karen Hooper

I've just downloaded the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide by Karen Hooper from PACKT Publishing and will be reviewing it shortly - it's going to take me a little while to make it through the 296 page tome. My first impressions though are good, very good. This isn't a book for developers wanting to learn XPages. It's a book for the users in your organisation, something that has been lacking in the notes world lately. You can obtain copies of the book at the PACT Publishing Website ( http://www.packtpub.com/ ). Stay tuned, I'll have the review here shortly.

Patch Tuesday - There is no SOE

So, once again Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is breaking all records and we're in a quandry. We can either accept the risk of applying 28 untested (by us) patches to fix 49 vulnerabilities or we can accept the security risks of not applying the patches. Both choices are difficult but in the end, I'm always going to accept the "upgrade risk" versus the "security risk". Gone are the old days So, why don't we just delay it a bit and test it all out? In the old days (and certainly in a much larger company) this would have been possible but right now, we only have a small IT department and a constantly shifting Standard Operating Environment (SOE). As I've said before - there is no longer such a thing as a SOE in today's computing environment. We start out with an idea of the software to be loaded and the options and location in which it gets loaded, that's standard. Then, all the applications upgrade themselves at different intervals and sudde

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2: Upgrading your Icons from 16x16 to 32x32

I've upgraded my client to Notes 8.5.2, sure it took a couple of goes and I ended up having to completely uninstall and reinstall - but I got there. I've since done an upgrade on a different PC (but that one didn't have designer) and I didn't have the same problems - so, maybe it was just a glitch on my PC. So... What's new in IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2? Well, if you really want to learn the answer to that question, ask IBM . There's something about XPages too I think but the really important bit is ... the icons.. no, really... We've been waiting ages for this. Let's hope it won't be another 18 years before we get 64x64 icons. So... the first thing I did in the 8.5.2 designer was upgrade my Smurf. Yep, the database that I've had as my best friend for the last 15 years of my working life has an excessively blue smurf as its icon. A "choked smurf". I decided to restore him to normal colour - and it's easy. All I did was; Find a new 3

Our IBM/Lotus Renewals and TCO

I've just finished the IBM/Lotus renewal cycle for the year and either IBM has made some changes for the better or I'm losing my grip on my sanity. Whatever the reason, this year the process actually made sense . The Cost and the TCO We're actually quite a small domino shop but our annual renewals would have covered the cost of a 4WD vehicle from a reputable dealer. This is at least in part due to our office technology mentality. We have our main domino server which is capable of running pretty much everything and we have a second server that we use to run one of our more intensive apps (which I'll talk about in another post). On top of all this, we have an offsite business continuity server which we've never actually used "for real" - only in test situations. Domino is too stable for it to be a necessity and it's really only there to guard against ISP or "location" failure. Then we've got a development server and a test server. These a

How to Install the OpenNTF Document Management Plugin for Lotus Notes 8.5.x

There's now a great new OpenNTF document management plug-in for Notes. I'm interested in seeing if I can move away from MS Office and this little utility seems to me to be the best way to start. It allows you to work on documents in folders while still keeping things available for users who prefer to access folders directly. The only caveat that I've found so far is that it wants everything to be stored in OpenDocument format and will convert the imports accordingly. So... I've just installed this plug-in and in typical "dumb-user" fashion, I had to ask a number of questions of the authors. I thought that to save others a bit of time and to illustrate the whole procedure, I'd make the procedure available here. Even if you're not interested in this particular plug-in, you might be interested in some of the others which are available. (like the awesome FileNavigator project). These steps might just be the ticket to installing them. My instructions w

The Notes UI and Sending a Link to a File - Part 2

Thanks to everyone who responded yesterday. I've considered and tested the responses to find the method which will be simplest for our users. What follows is a set of instructions.... We start our instructions by identifying the file we want to link to. Often for me, this will be a MPEG, AVI or giant PDF (because why else would you link rather than attach?) but in this example, I'm just using a MS Word Document. You can see my path here is: M:\Dept\IT\2010\Development\ExtraNet\Concepts and my file name is Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc Thus; my entire path and filename would be; M:\Dept\IT\2010\Development\ExtraNet\Concepts\Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc Already by working the actual filespec out we're stepping slightly beyond the boundaries of the typical user. Next, we type our email and highlight the words we want to link to a file; Then we click the new "LINK" icon in Notes 8.5 This gives us a nice little box in which to type our URL. If this was

The Notes UI and Sending a Link to a File

Yesterday I found myself explaining to a new but technical user that Notes/Domino is, like Blackberry. An amazingly powerful and capable piece of software capable of everything that the competition is capable of - plus a whole lot more. ....and hampered by what is still one of the worst user interfaces in the world. Sorry Notes UI team - I know you're doing your best. The same goes for the blackberry team. I know that they're doing their best too. It's just that the user interfaces have so far yet to go. So, this morning, the same user asks me how to send a link to a file on our common drives without sending the attachment everywhere. He's already cleverly tried attaching the .LNK file, but our policies don't allow that as it's considered to be an executable file. I said to him that I didn't actually know. 18+ years of using the product and I still really don't know how to do this. I know several workarounds but I don't know of any one all-enc

Article: 5 Million Web Sites Served Malware for at Least 3 Months - And Nobody Noticed!

I really want to direct your attention to the following article which appeared today; Malicious widget hacked millions of Web sites Parked sites hosted by Network Solutions spread malware since at least May http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/081610-malicious-widget-hacked-millions-of.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_security_2010-08-17 Essentially the article says that up to 5 million web sites have been serving up malware for at least the last three months - and nobody noticed. Even worse, it appears that nobody was safe; "The widget turned every infected domain into a drive-by attack site that launched the multi-exploit "Nuke" toolkit against users running Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera" Typically, the malware seems to only affect Windows PCs. Roll on Chromium OS! I'm not sure how much longer I can continue to support windows environments for anything other than games. There's also the fact that the cleanup hasn't been completed. "Although

Our Lotus Domino Cluster Failover Problem

In certain computing circles, "clustering" is a dirty word. I've heard of situations where, far from providing business continuity peace of mind, it creates more work and greater risk than it would if it were not involved. This is not the case with Domino clustering. Done properly, it is extremely reliable Our Problem Recently, our cluster seems to have "picked up a slight flutter". Actually, I think that perhaps the rules behind it may have changed sometime around our 8.0 or 8.5 migration. So, first I want to cover off basically what our cluster looks like; Ok, this is quite a simplistic view and there are servers missing. I'm concentrating on the problem area only. We have an onsite and offsite clustered Lotus Domino server, both running Lotus Domino 8.5 HF 1021. We'll call them "Onsite" and "Offsite" for ease of reference. The servers are quite a distance apart because we're clustering for business continuity purposes. The th

Quick Rant: Why does Blackberry Discriminate against Australians?

I've noticed this on Blackberry a lot over the years and it always irritates me. Today, I thought I should post a quick rant to pass that irritation on. See the picture... Why the discrimination against Australians and South Koreans? I'm sure I could bypass this with the right IP filter but that's not the point. Why do we get picked on. What have we ever done to Blackberry?

The Problems of Real-World Collaboration in Legal and Financial Industry

Collaboration is the main buzzword in the computer industry these days and there are offerings from all the major vendors; IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Google. Their collaboration bundles have all recently leapt from the desktop into the web 2.0 cloud and seem to be the answer to all our business problems - but are they? I think that the answer is very industry specific. I have no doubt that collaboration is a boon for the computing industry and I can see how the sharing of code and the discussion of bugs and product features can provide huge benefits. I can see similar benefits for project management in other industries such as mining and manufacturing too. The benefits for big business, particularly big "distributed" businesses with offices all around the world are obvious but it's one thing to look at collaboration within the business. External business-to-business collaboration however is a whole new ballgame. It's what collaboration is really all about. Who doesn

Another Anti-virus Rant

This post is going to be an easy read because I don't have any time to update the blog at the moment - so just look at the pictures. Most people who've spent any time with me on the computer know that I hate anti-virus products because I think that they spend too much time slowing down the system without any guarantee of actually fixing the problem. Here's an example which just happened about five minutes ago. I received an email containing an obviously bad file. It passed neatly through our external scanning system which consists of SEVERAL different anti-virus and anti-spam filters. I knew it would be a virus, so I saved it to my hard drive. You can see that it has a Microsoft Word icon but that it ends in .EXE. If you accept the windows default to hide extensions for known file types, you'll never see the EXE and you might even be fooled into thinking that _doc is the same as .doc. So... I right clicked on the file and chose scan from the context menu. As mentioned

Computer Malware - How well did the System hold up?

I recently had the first virus infection on my home computer since the early nineties. It was a particularly nasty Java exploit called XP Internet Security 2010 . This seems to be quite a widespread thing, easily catchable, you just have to visit a web site that has various advertisements on it and according to some reports it has even infected the advertising on the US White Pages sites. So, I guess that what was interesting about this whole thing is how well the anti-virus and anti-malware systems held up. McAfee I used to say that McAfee protects my system but now I'll just have to say that it's resident on my system - at least until it expires. Then again, since it was about as useful as an umbrella on a battlefield, it might not even last that long. McAfee's firewall and Anti-virus didn't even pop up a speech bubble during the entire infection episode. Talk about pointless software - All it seems to do is slow the system down with pathetic real-time scans. Sym

IBM's Weird Domino Strategy

We had the re-badged "Lotus Comes To You" event in Sydney a couple of weeks ago - "collaboration something or rather...." As usual it was an interesting event but I couldn't help getting some strange vibes from both the business partners and from fellow customers on the Lotus brand. I figured that this was as good a time as any to share them. The "Package" One of the greatest things about Lotus Notes/Domino is its swiss-army knife style ability to do just about anything. ROI in the domino world is a great thing. There's fewer servers to buy, less software and amazing integration. Any existing Domino server can be converted to a different type of domino server without the need to reinstall. For example, it's simple to convert a mail server to a document database server and/or a web server. Such a thing would never happen in the Microsoft world. I guess we've all used the swiss army knife analogy at some point. It's a key strength.

Book Review: IBM Lotus notes and Domino 8.5.1 - The Upgrader's Guide

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1: The Upgrader's Guide by Tim Speed, Barry Rosen, Joseph Anderson, Dick McCarrick, Bennie Gibson, Brad Schauf and David Byrd Published by PACKT Publishing. This book clocks in at about 336 pages which is nowhere near enough to be a complete administrator's guide to the gigantic field that IBM Lotus Notes and Domino has become. Fortunately, it identifies its market well and restricts itself firmly to its stated objectives. The book aims to introduce Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 to people who are already familiar with earlier versions of Notes/Domino. It's not a dummies guide and it's not an administrators handbook. It's purely and simply an upgrader's guide. As someone who never actually bothers to read the "what's new" section of the help files which ship with IBM products, and who instead relies solely on the blogging community (and Lotus-Comes-To-You) to highlight the main interest points, this was always going

Book Preview: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1

I was only recently lamenting the lack of Notes 8 books in Australia, when I got sent this one to review. It looks interesting and it certainly will fill a gap. I'll bring you a detailed review when I've had a proper read. In the meantime, if you're interested, jump right in and get it - it seems very comprehensive. IBM Notes and Domino 8.5.1 by Barry Rosen , Bennie Gibson , Brad Schauf , David Byrd , Dick McCarrick , Joseph Anderson , Tim Speed Chapter 8: What's new in Notes/Domino 8.5 Development is available for download for free (in PDF format). It's a good place to start. Click here for further information;

Overcoming Password Woes - A Presentation

With our recent change to everyone's password and the hardening of some of our standards, we've understandably got a bit of internal confusion over passwords. I decided to not only sort out our internal problems but also give our users some great tips for their internet passwords. Here's a presentation I've prepared for our users. I've stripped off branding and names so that you can use it in your own organisations. You have my permission to reuse it as you see fit.